[pmmail-list] network drives

[Ralph Cohen]

On Thu, 30 May 2002 20:16:01 -0400, Michael Lueck wrote:

>>The second problem I
>>ran into was a delay on the Win2k system when accessing email from the
>>OS/2 system.  Fixing this required patching the PMMail executable on
>>the Win2k system which was relatively simple.  If you run into the same
>>problem, I'll be happy to send you the instructions for the patch.
>
>What patch? I have done the config change to NetBEUI to make the Win2K params
>match the OS/2 and DOS ones... but I have heard nothing about actually patching
>the PMMail executable file. PMMail opens in 1 mins from the server, and in
>about 7 seconds local. I would say that is a slightly noticable delay for me.
>And the server is no small toy either.


Hi Michael,

I don't know who originally wrote the following, but I've used the
following procedure to patch the PMMail WIn executable with great
success on everything through the last beta.  

=-=-=-=-=
The speed problem of PMMail under Win98SE / Win2000 when running
from a mapped network drive is NOT a problem of Windows but one of
PMMail: Every time a message is selected for reading (Preview pane
or double click) PMMail splits header and body of the mail and
transforms the body to rich text format which is then loaded into
the viewer. The implementation of this transformation is very poor,
since PMMail converts line by line instead of reading the mail body
in, converting it in memory and writing it back to disk. This causes
heavy network I/O load! Since 98SE and 2000 cache network file I/O
in a different manner from the other Windows versions, this
behaviour leads to trouble. The solution is to let PMMail create the
.rtf intermediate file on the local disk. Unfortunately it has no
setting for it nor does it obey the standard TMP environment
variable. So you have to patch the binary:

Get a Hex editor, close PMMail, search for the string
".\temp\temp.rtf" in the file pmmailw.exe and replace it by the
string "c:\tmp\temp.rtf". Create the directory c:\tmp, if not
already there and start PMMail again. Enjoy the speed...
=-=-=-=-=

The only thing I would add, is that there are 7-8 of these path entries
in the pmmailw.exe file and I didn't know if there was a particular one
that needed to be changed, so I did a search and replace and changed
them all.  Everything's worked fine since.  Of course, make a backup of
your original file so you'll be sure not to need it.<g>

Ralph

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